Startling research published by the TUC today calculates that the unpaid overtime worked by British employees is equivalent to more than a million extra full-time jobs. That’s two billion hours given to employers for free. It’s also two billion hours that people don’t spend with their families, volunteering in their communities, exercising, or just relaxing.
via Mike Harris – Two billion reasons to rethink the economy | the new economics foundation.
The open letter … brought to the surface long-simmering tensions. In the past several years, staffers have faced temporary pay cuts, layoffs, and buyouts. They have worked since March without a new contract. Regarding ongoing negotiations, the letter notes that Sulzberger’s “negotiators have demanded a freeze of our pension plan and an end to our independent health insurance.” O’Meara said staffers did not receive a raise this year.
Such compensation and benefit issues are playing out while the Times faces a problem with retention, as executive editor Jill Abramson acknowledged when she landed the paper’s highest-ranking masthead job last June. The Times, which could once keep high-profile reporters and editors from heading to rival newspapers based on the paper’s cachet alone, has recently faced increased competition for top talent from non-traditional outlets, such as Bloomberg News, ESPN, and The Huffington Post.
via New York Times Staffers Express ‘Profound Dismay’ With Management.
The economies of nations are now interconnected so tightly that trouble in one place will propagate throughout the system. There’s not enough flexibility and resilience,
The inescapable conclusion: Our modern high-tech markets, in which more money than ever before swirls around the globe in a blink of an eye, are better at transmitting panic and fear than anything heretofore created by humans. If civilization is supposed to imply progress, then something has gone very awry: In the second decade of the 21st century, our infrastructure is increasingly fragile, increasingly prone to disruption. The sword of Damocles hangs above everyone’s head, and the thread that keeps it from falling is fraying perilously thin.
What is perhaps most fascinating about this state of affairs is how it has arisen as a consequence of global capital’s relentless quest for lower operating costs and greater efficiency and flexibility. The better we get at extending supply and production chains across the globe, the more vulnerable those chains become to a disruption at any given point. The faster we enable the transmission of information around the world and through the financial markets, the more volatile those markets become, as every new headline sends a different trading signal.
via World on the verge of a nervous breakdown – Globalization – Salon.com.
According to AlterNet, more than “500 rural farmers, urban farmers, food laborers, community activists and former occupiers” showed up for the beginning of the day at an East Village community garden, which began with Bronx urban farmer Karen Washington telling an energetic crowd of her journey over the past two decades to create a healthy food environment for her neighborhood.
Washington, who helped found the City Farms Markets, a series of community-run farmers markets, was stunned to hear that “food was a privilege and not a right”. So she set out to change that, mainly by putting her hands in the dirt, planting seeds and feeding her community. Through her work in the Bronx, Washington is helping combat the major issues of obesity, diabetes and lack of access to healthy food faced by underserved communities. …
Over the past three decades, the U.S. has adopted economic policies promoted by Wall Street investment banks and agribusiness monopolies that have led to massive concentration in food and agriculture. Today market concentration is so great that only four firms control 84 percent of beef packing and 66 percent of pork production, which has resulted in forcing more than 1.1 million independent livestock producers out of business since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.
via Farmers March with Occupy Wall Street: Sowing the Seeds of Hope and Democracy.
It’s easy to list the characteristics of an ideal “Occupy” bank. Setting one up is rather harder. The legal and institutional obstacles to establishing a new (or de novo) bank are formidable and would require years of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more. One alternative therefore might be for Occupy to partner with or even acquire a bank that is already established and that shares our vision. Indeed there are many small banks around the country which might be amenable—community banks, or so-called “triple bottom line” banks, which aim for community development and positive social and environmental impacts as much as profit.
Our group works on, and we are well aware that we may not succeed. But there are other groups around the country thinking about this problem: Occupy San Francisco is already setting up its own credit union. Perhaps our work will inspire someone else to set up a bank like the one we are imagining. If many attempts are made, there is a greater chance that one will succeed.
Is Dimon right? Do people hate him just because he’s rich and successful? That really would be unfair. Maybe we should ask the people of Jefferson County, Alabama, what they think.
That particular locality is now in bankruptcy proceedings primarily because Dimon’s bank, Chase, used middlemen to bribe local officials – literally bribe, with cash and watches and new suits – to sign on to a series of onerous interest-rate swap deals that vastly expanded the county’s debt burden.
Essentially, Jamie Dimon handed Birmingham, Alabama a Chase credit card and then bribed its local officials to run up a gigantic balance, leaving future residents and those residents’ children with the bill. As a result, the citizens of Jefferson County will now be making payments to Chase until the end of time.
via A Christmas Message From America’s Rich | | Rolling Stone.
Congress should reform our tax law to put the brakes on further inequality. Specifically, we propose an automatic extra tax on the income of the top 1 percent of earners — a tax that would limit the after-tax incomes of this club to 36 times the median household income.
Importantly, our Brandeis tax does not target excessive income per se; it only caps inequality. Billionaires could double their current income without the tax kicking in — as long as the median income also doubles. The sky is the limit for the rich as long as the “rising tide lifts all boats.” Indeed, the tax gives job creators an extra reason to make sure that corporate wealth does in fact trickle down.
via Don’t Tax the Rich. Tax Inequality Itself. – NYTimes.com.
Here is where the movement to end poverty could gain inspiration from the proudly unprofessional activists who have seized spaces and occupied the national discourse these past few months. Historically, like OWS, successful poor people’s movements have preferred justice to charity, pursuing goals set not by policy shops but by the people who know most intimately what kind of change they need, and on whose vigorous participation the movement depends. When Lyndon Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act in 1964 as part of his War on Poverty, it contained a provision calling for “maximum feasible participation” of the poor—a provision that “grew out of the mass civil rights mobilizations in the 1950s and early 1960s that, with blood and sacrifice, had won basic political rights for African Americans across the South,” writes historian Annelise Orleck in her introduction to The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964–1980. The law secured funding for more than 1,000 community action agencies across the country, which helped engage and politicize poor mothers, who fought many battles over the ensuing decade for better food, schools and healthcare for their families (and won some of them). Imagine that: a president signing a law that asked for, even paid for, grassroots participation to shape policies and decide priorities. It sounds utopian now—even under a president who once worked as a community organizer—but as OWS has reminded us, sometimes the size of the demand is the measure of a movement.
Ever since an earthquake in Taiwan in 1999 disrupted Dell’s supply chain, it’s been clear that the relentless search for flexibility, cheap labor coasts, and just-in-time manufacturing has a significant downside. Knock one link out of the chain, and the whole mechanism comes to a complete hall. We witnessed this on a huge scale when the Fukushima earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster disrupted all kinds of supply chains and slowed global economic growth. Thailand is just the latest case study.
But there’s another story here about climate change. Thailand has long been prone to disastrous flooding….
But the worst flooding in decades happens to be exactly what scientists have predicted will happen in Thailand as a result of rising temperatures. In the future we can expect even greater climate-related disruptions. So what happens when you mix a global economy built on fragile globe-spanning supply and production chains with increasing incidences of extreme weather events? You get chaos.
via Intel’s woes expose a rickety new world order – U.S. Economy – Salon.com.
There is so much at stake in our industry. It is one of the nation’s most dangerous occupations. We don’t think truck driving should be a dead-end road in America. It should be a good job with a middle-class paycheck like it used to be decades ago.
We desperately want to drive clean and safe vehicles. Rigs that do not fill our lungs with deadly toxins, or dirty the air in the communities we haul in.
Poverty and pollution are like a plague at the ports. Our economic conditions are what led to the environmental crisis.
You, the public, have paid a severe price along with us.
Why? Just like Wall Street doesn’t have to abide by rules, our industry isn’t bound to regulation. So the market is run by con artists. The companies we work for call us independent contractors, as if we were our own bosses, but they boss us around. We receive Third World wages and drive sweatshops on wheels. We cannot negotiate our rates. (Usually we are not allowed to even see them.) We are paid by the load, not by the hour. So when we sit in those long lines at the terminals, or if we are stuck in traffic, we become volunteers who basically donate our time to the trucking and shipping companies. That’s the nice way to put it. We have all heard the words “modern-day slaves” at the lunch stops.
Truth and Traditions 